All the Broken Places: A Novel

I'm working my way through all of John Boyne. When I finished "The Heart's Invisible Furies," I had a new favorite author. His prose delivers like lyrics that make you think rather than sing."All the Broken Places" is a haunting and introspective novel that explores guilt, complicity, and the burden of history. The author deftly time-hops between Gretel Fernsby’s present-day geriatric life in London and her harrowing childhood as the daughter of a Nazi concentration camp commandant, revealing her struggle to confront the moral choices she has long avoided. Now, she faces a current moral dilemma to add to her nightmares. Boyne takes readers on a ride of reckoning and redemption, proving that history's ghosts are never truly buried.This book is a sequel to "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" but is written such that reading the previous book is not required. Excellent novel!

I enjoyed this story so much . I loved hearing about the life of Gretel , young and old .I imagined her sitting with her neighbor Henry , a child that loved reading but was terribly abused by his Father and how Gretel ‘s desire was to save him . She showed immense love for him .

To the great plethora of books about the devastation of Nazi Germany is added "All the Broken Places" by Irish writer John Boyne. While well-written and compulsively readable, the plot of this novel hinges on a falsehood -- that the children of Nazi war criminals could be persecuted for the crimes of their parents. Having watched the excellent documentary "Hitler's Children" when it came out about ten years ago, I immediately questioned this premise. I did some more research and found that I was right. The wives of Nazi elite could be brought in for questioning, to be sure, by the Nuremberg tribunal, but even they weren't charged with crimes. The children were treated as children, innocent bystanders. So, without this reality, much of the motivation for the actions of the main character, Gretel Fernsby, is dubious. Her personal guilt for what happened to her brother makes more sense. But even this triggered something in my brain, for I knew I had heard this particular plot before. And, indeed, I read the author's biography and found that he was the author of "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas". I'd watched the movie years before. The plot of "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is also part of this book. The book moves along quite smartly, flipping between 2022 and the post-WW2 period and even mid twentieth-century, and I didn't find this narrative technique hard to follow. There is no doubt that Boyne can spin a tale. The problem becomes the believability of the plot. There is also a lot of very unpleasant narrative about wife and child abuse that I found upsetting. Necessary to the plot, but just hard to read. Still, I found I couldn't put it down because I kept wanting to know what was going to happen. So, all in all, a good read, but certainly not destined to be a classic.

First off this is so well written you feel elevated just reading it. To find beauty in covering this topic is a huge task in itself. I took all afternoon to read the last few pages as I didn’t want it to end. I cannot wait to recommend this to the ladies I’m meeting for dinner this evening. It is fantastic.

When I first started this book I thought another Hitler story. It was about Germany and so much suffering and upheaval of lives, however the story was so much more. The ending was not expected. Everything all came together in such an amazing way. I have read other books by this author but this one is my favorite.

I enjoyed this book more than I can describe. It’s a well crafted and believable story about loss and guilt. It held my interest throughout, in spite of my attention deficit issues. Bravo to the author.

In The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas Boyne cleverly wove the horror of the concentration camps into the family life of a camp commandant.In the same style, he brings that commandant's daughter into our world. She is constantly on the run and living a lie because of her past but she is also a girl growing up and later an elderly woman who is kind and concerned about a small boy with an abusive father.Boyne has woven a clever plot in which the baddies get their comeuppance just as we would like and a key character who is Jewish is able to get his revenge for the commandant's racism in a way that is quite breathtaking yet only known to the daughter and the reader.I have given this work four stars rather than five because for me the plot was rather too engineered to achieve its intended political statements. It also seemed to go on too long and I started page skipping in the final quarter.

To my knowledge, I’ve never read the author’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. I distinctly remember seeing parts of the movie, and am familiar with its subject matter. This novel is essentially a sequel to that novel, following the life of young Bruno’s sister in the years after the events at Auschwitz.Gretel is a German woman, whose father was Commandant at Auschwitz. In the aftermath of the war, as her father is executed for war crimes, young Gretel and her mother flee to Paris under assumed names.The book follows two threads. One features 91-year-old Gretel in the final stages of her life in a tony flat in London. The other follows her earlier life, first in Paris, then Australia, and finally her early years in London.This is a magnificent novel. Well deserving of its Pulitzer Prize nomination. It is well written and highly engaging. My only quibble would be the repeated insinuation that Gretel is always in danger of discovery and ultimately harsh punishment for her role during the war. Her role was that of a 12-year-old child. I doubt, under those circumstances, that she was ever in any danger whatsoever, other than that of possible bad publicity.